Thanks to Jason Andrade, Sean O'Connell, Donald Rothkugel, and Gerhard Nolte
for their responses to this. I tried the following:
1) Make sure that NFS_LOCKING was set to 1 in /etc/rc.config. It was.
2) Set the Mail_locking (whatever the precise name for it is) to 1, not 5,
to use lock files instead of fctrl locks. This did not have a noticeable
effect.
We had successfully used the same mail clients with a Solaris 2.5 mail
server. It seemed to me that the locking mechanism must have worked OK
there. When we originally switched to the DEC mail server, we tried keeping
our mail spool on a Network Appliance (a high performance nfs server). We
had lots of "stale nfs file handle" errors, apparently due to file locking
problems. We moved the spool to a local directory on the DEC, and
eliminated the nfs errors, but still had lock errors. (Binmail said that it
was waiting on a lock file, and then dropped the mail it was trying to
deliver.)
After all of this, I suspected a problem with the way that binmail handles
file locking. I switched to using procmail as my local delivery agent, and
this appears to have solved the problem.
David Ritch
Received on Thu Mar 12 1998 - 06:30:10 NZDT